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Model Says Religiosity Gene Will Dominate Society
Hugh Pickens writes writes "PhysOrg reports on a study by Robert Rowthorn, emeritus professor at Cambridge University, that predicts that the genetic components that predispose a person toward religion are currently "hitchhiking" on the back of the religious cultural practice of high fertility rates and that provided the fertility of religious people remains on average higher than that of secular people, the genes that predispose people towards religion will spread. For example, in the past 20 years, the Amish population in the US has doubled, increasing from 123,000 in 1991 to 249,000 in 2010. The huge growth stems almost entirely from the religious culture's high fertility rate, which is about 6 children per woman, on average. Rowthorn says that while fertility is determined by culture, an individual's predisposition toward religion is likely to be influenced by genetics, in addition to their upbringing. In the model, Rowthorn uses a "religiosity gene" to represent the various genetic factors that combine to genetically predispose a person toward religion, whether remaining religious from youth or converting to religion from a secular upbringing. Rowthorn's model predicts that the religious fraction of the population will eventually stabilize at less than 100%, and there will remain a possibly large percentage of secular individuals. But nearly all of the secular population will still carry the religious allele, since high defection rates will spread the religious allele to secular society when defectors have children with a secular partner."
Religiosity gene. Wow, really? Gee, what's next, the gay gene?
I've seen kids from very religious households go in all different directions with respect to religions. It seems very unlikely that there's anything like a genetic "predisposition" to religion.
Now what will happen is that more people will grow up in religious households than not; but that I see as a good thing, as it will decrease the overall fear of religion from people who don't have much direct experience with it. People do stupid things out of fear and fear of religion and those that practice it is no different. In reality although I'm not religious myself, most friends and families I have known that have been very religious have been fine people and I have no desire to see anyones ability to practice the religion they choose impacted.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes I said it, this should have never made the front page:
Religious people nowadays have more children on average than their secular counterparts. This paper uses a simple model to explore the evolutionary implications of this difference. It assumes that fertility is determined entirely by culture, whereas subjective predisposition towards religion is influenced by genetic endowment. People who carry a certain ‘religiosity’ gene are more likely than average to become or remain religious. The paper considers the effect of religious defections and exogamy on the religious and genetic composition of society. Defections reduce the ultimate share of the population with religious allegiance and slow down the spread of the religiosity gene. However, provided the fertility differential persists, and people with a religious allegiance mate mainly with people like themselves, the religiosity gene will eventually predominate despite a high rate of defection. This is an example of ‘cultural hitch-hiking’, whereby a gene spreads because it is able to hitch a ride with a high-fitness cultural practice. The theoretical arguments are supported by numerical simulations.
link to abstract
I am all for keeping an open mind but after reading that last sentence, I suspect the paper is quite ridiculous and may actually be a funny read.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
So there's an evolutionary advantage to not believing in evolution? Whoda thunk it?
Whats behind religiosity is probably something more broad and fundamental, like following leaders, belonging to groups, easy to be suggestionable and things like that. But religions are more culture than genes, they belong to the meme terrotory, and is of the bad ones. In any case, the movie Idiocracy explain it better, and probably the base explanation and causes are the same.
Religiosity is mainly just a predisposition to value things like group solidarity
and the stability that comes from enforced conformity and hierarchical authority.
Someone who values these things (or fears the lack of them) more than they
value some kind of quest for truth or rationality or objectivity, is predisposed
to religion.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What a ******* load of bunk !
The gene VMAT2 is likely what they are talking about. VMAT2 is a physiological arrangement that produces the sensations associated, by some, with mystic experiences, including the presence of God or others.
Carl Zimmer claimed that, given the low explanatory power of VMAT2, it would have been more accurate for Hamer to call his book A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene
It's worth noting that one of the other research pioneers of this so called God Gene, Dean H. Hamer pretty much disproves the whole God Gene theory in his own book by the same title.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faith-boosting-genes
There are no atheists during Orgasms or when you bang your knee.
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
I agree (I'm an atheist).
Uh, pardon? I'm under the impression there's an incredibly elaborate system (science) that goes to extraordinary lengths to prove their postulations. Electron microscopes have imaged discrete atoms, and a couple of cities in Japan have seen first hand the results of what you can do with that knowledge, not to mention all the nuclear reactors throughout the world, and the electronic devices we all live with.
I postulate that the religious are susceptible to a very mild form of schizophrenia. They want to believe in voices they hear in their heads, and other "things that go bump in the night."
It's easier for them than accepting things they can't, or don't want to bother to, understand.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
A better example is the Thirty Years War:
from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_years_war
There is a reason behind the rise of secularism in Europe and of the general ideology of the European Enlightenment. The 17th and 18th century knew full well what demons could be unleashed by religious conflict.
Keep this history in mind when faced with claims that atheism has resulted in more horrors than religion.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
I'm actually not completely hostile to the hypothesis - I'm fairly convinced that lots of behavior that we think is largely subject to free will is, in fact, heritable. Even those with a scientific bent tend to gloss over the real implications of evolution - evolution never stops. The selection pressures just change. One reason that modern Western society seems to take better in some places than others has a lot to do with the selective pressures that came from urbanization - over amazingly brief periods of time, the selective pressures of evolution have equipped urbanized cultures with a set of skills and value structures that support modern life, but those alleles are scarce among groups that never urbanized. They thus have trouble adapting to Western civilization - their evolution hasn't selected for those traits. Give them a few generations and those traits will start to appear - either through the higher expression of local alleles that are conducive to urbanization or from the importation of those alleles from visitors or immigrants. Pick up a copy of Nick Wade's Before the Dawn.
That said, I'm very skeptical of this new "the religious will outbreed us" meme. It's fairly uncontroversial that religious folk outbreed secular types, especially in modern Western societies. But these self-same societies were, in the not too distant past, for more religious than they are now. I'm not just talking pre-Enlightenment times (when the religious/secular ratio was probably near a peak), but even since. American culture is prone to Great Awakenings, when the religious nature of America reaches local peaks. Soon thereafter, however, a wave of secularism occurs - emerging from the huge cohort of children of those highly religious types had during the previous Awakening.
So, it seems to me there are multiple factors involved here, both cultural and genetic. My suspicion is that alleles that predispose toward religious impulses have synergistic reactions with those that predispose toward secularism - that the mix of alleles is too complex to push us too far in any one direction.
But who knows - evolution never stops. If religion (or secularism) is selected strongly enough, only our great grandchildren will know for sure.
"On the other hand, the non-conformists may have been the big innovators, and were probably more flexible in the face of change, like changing climate conditions, or exploring new terrain. "
Exactly, and being successful would have rewarded such individuals with access to all the best wenches. Which would have spread their genes into the religious population getting us to where we are now.
The problem with today's society is that there is no sexual reward for being a science oriented non-conforming innovator.
Therefore, I suggest that anyone who demonstrates high aptitude or innovation in one of the sciences gets to sleep with any religious girl they choose, no condoms of course. How about one girl for every article you get published.
True. But what would people say if someone went around writing books about how they didn't collect stamps, and everyone who did was crazy. Then they'd start enumerating which of the stamps other people had were the silliest ones to collect, and explain away any things that resembled stamps in their house.
Not collecting stamps might not be a hobby, but bashing another's hobby can certainly turn into one.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.